So, what do I mean by "eating the seed corn of its future military power?"
I mean the downstream effects of the death of men like Viktor Khozhainov, recently of the Military Training and Research Center (VUNTS) of the Russian Air Force.
The generally accepted Western Intelligence order of battle for the Russian Army in Feb 2022 was ~400,000.
The actual body count was not over 300k due to the "ghost troop" scam.
That is 1/4 of the troops existed only on paper & Russian officers pocketed that 1/4 payroll. 3/
Everything in the Russian Army that was deployable in Feb 2022 was in the 190,000 sent into Ukraine by the end of March 2022.
Then lots of "non deployable" assets in Feb 2022 were made to be deployable through the year of 2022.
They were deployed, and then consumed.
4/
Stripping logistics for infantry replacements is standard for strained militaries. Every military did it in WW2.
Russia did it in 2022 without having enough logistics to start with.
"There are more conscripts where that came from, comrade," was the RuAF attitude.
5/
The RuAF stripped all of the training establishments, then they also stripped the academies, and finally gave all of the students junior officer commissions so they could deploy them.
>Poof<
That happened Q2/Q3, March/April, of 2022.
6/
That is when people like Viktor Khozhainov got put into an operational units, and now he has been...consumed.
Training establishments are the dragon's teeth of a military.
They sew the teeth that grow into trained manpower for tomorrow's fighting.
7/
But the Russians went far beyond that as they also stripped their research establishments.
It appears most were used up as infantry and tank/AFV crews.
The article I saw on researchers talked about a tank crew made up of officers with specialty skills sets in areas of...
8/
...science who were dropped into a tank with maybe a day of training and told to "figure it out themselves."🤯
That shows the Putin regime could not give a tinker's damn about the future of Russian military-technological power.
Only power right this second counts.
9/
The woes of the now destroyed Marine Bde at Vuhledar are another example.
Want to bet that most of these "Elite Marines" were repurposed sailors pulled off Black Sea Fleet warships?
There are reports of this happening last year to the sailor-survivors of Moskva.
10/
The Mobik units of the Russian Army collapsing on Bakhmut's flanks are the 'downstream' of the consumption of RuAF training establishment manpower like Viktor Khozhainov.
...drone warfare tactics of veteran infantry using radios to talk to DJI drone controllers that are providing "Tinkerbell overwatch."
Overwatch which is telling Ukrainian assault troops where to throw grenades in the Russian trench system.
12/
And the 1 February 2022 the RuAF training establishment, which should have taught those Mobik troops all about Ukrainian "Tinkerbell overwatch" drone warfare, are as dead as Viktor Khozhainov.
13/
There is a name for this sort of attritional collapse in military skills.
Where each generation of new Russian troops mobilized is less skilled than the last.
My "Slow-Walking" metric for old US MIM-24 Hawks being transferred to Ukraine are USMC MIM-23s that were upgraded for ATBM work after 1991 with improved missile fusing and TPS-59 radars (picture).
The USMC then retired these ATBM MIM-23s in 1999. 3/
What is is about Biden Administration's De-Escalation officials that they keep trying to make Biden look weak and make the Russo-Ukrainian war drag on?
"We'll give Ukraine NATO Surplus F-16's without the missiles they need to win."
I've been beating the Biden Administration over the head on it's "avoid providing Ukraine with F-16's" shell game since April 2022, and it is May 2023.
The Biden Administration simply lacks the political will to provide F-16's.
What the h--l will the Biden Administration do if former President Trump said he would give mothballed F-16's to Ukraine to end the Ukraine war to lower US gas & food prices?
And said Biden's refusal to do so for 13 months shows he is afraid of Putin?
The contrast between Ukrainian media and "anonymous Pentagon sources" about the success Ukraine had with MIM-104 Patriots last night cannot be more stark.
It looks like the De-escalation camp in Washington DC wants to burn Ukraine for successfully using the Patriot to "clean sweep" 6 x Kh-47M2 KILLJOY, because it makes them look like weak fools for with holding F-16's.
The skill with which Patriot and every other high tech Western weapon provided to Ukraine underlines the fact that there is no logistical or skill issue involved with providing F-16's.
It's simply a lack of American political will.
3/4
Russia tried a "...concerted planned effort with ballistic missiles, drones, and cruise missiles in a multi axis attack to degrade and swamp and then destroy defences....and it failed"
Saturation attacks on a 2.5 missile batteries with 200 ready to launch missiles are going to need a whole lot of attacking drones, missiles & planes to guarantee success.
Given a 90% hit rate, you need more than 180 attackers are required to get one through the defense.
2/5
And with 20 Patriot launchers, plus radars plus command centers, you are going to need 40(+) to get through.
And as for the assumption that those night pictures & videos are of Patriot launchers as opposed to a NASAM, SAMP-T or IRIS-T launchers known to be in the Kyiv area?
3/5